She's Thunderstorms
by The Purple Pineapple
Summary: The closest he ever comes to understanding love is the moment he kisses her for the first time. Olitz one-shot. Fitz-focused.


He is five. Or at least he thinks he is five, when he remembers years later. He doesn't know. Not for sure. His family is different, has _always _been different - they do not recount the past with fondness. So he is five. He is playing with a wooden airplane under the table, waltzing it through the air, his small fingers lodged between the wings.

Footsteps. The clink of his mother's heels. The dull thump of his father's heavy boots. Yelling. Bad words. He doesn't know what they mean, no, he is too young, but he can feel the venom with which the words are laced linger in his mother's tone as she hisses - _Mistress - _over and over again. He now knows, it is a dirty word; a word which opens wounds even liquor cannot heal. It is a word opposite of love.

_Fuck - _his father keeps repeating, his voice too loud, or maybe it's just the kind of word that is trapped in grand dining rooms and polished parlors, never to make its way out of the apparent grandeur. _Fuck_ is whatever makes _mistresses _ok, or at least his father seems to think so; there is conviction in the man's voice - the kind that makes the boy shiver, the conviction that is often followed with heaviness of his fist against the soft skin. _Fuck, _he believes, still, years later, is what killed his mother. It wasn't the mistresses, no, it was the way his father saw them as inconsequential, as objects to be _fucked, _the way he saw his mother in a different light.

/

He is six when she dies and he doesn't remember much. He remembers the vomit on the tiles next to his feet. He remembers people, tall, so tall, coming in and out, walking around him, passing things over him, talking yelling. For the longest time he thinks they were saving. When he turns 16 he realizes they were cleaning. At 40, drinking with Cy in his office, he realizes they were cleaning up, covering up. He doesn't feel surprised.

/

There are two things his father hates - women and weakness, so the first time he kisses a girl he is surprised - by how soft the softness of his lips makes him feel. He is surprised by the warmth of her skin, the way it makes his lungs feel tights, but also incredibly light. He is fourteen, and afraid that when he comes home his father will know - he will know that his son is not a real man, that he is a boy, that he will forever be a boy, that he will forever be smitten by softness, enchanted by fragility, seduced by vulnerability. He _will _feel.

/

She is pretty. God, she's pretty. Those pearly white teeth, and the glowing skin, and the eyes with a hint of ice. He could love Millicent Grant. He loves Millicent Grant. At first it's a tender kind of love, the soft kind he felt for every girl he ever liked. And then it grows, it grows but he doesn't really understand the new feeling. It must be love he thinks, maybe, maybe for some people love feels like suffocating. They get married, and he knows - it's a wedding his mother would have approved of. And that, that makes him so incredibly happy. They dance and he holds her hand in the palm of his. They are friends. More than anything. And for a boy who grew up lonely, surrounded by heavy words and footsteps that echo, for a boy like him - love means - not to be lonely.

They are happy.

He still flies, his hands gripping the controls and it's the kind of exhilaration nothing else brings, the kind of freedom that nothing else comes even close to. It is the only perfection he has ever known, ever felt pulse through him. It crashes, and it has a number attached to it, the lives and the memories and the families and broken hearts, there are numbers. It no longer feels like freedom. It feels like a prison.

He doesn't know how they change, or why. He doesn't know how they become strangers, when once they were friends. He doesn't know. But he does know that the love is gone, he is sure of that, so sure, because love, love is not loneliness - and he feels the loneliest he's ever felt.

/

He runs. Once. Twice. On the coattails of his father. He hates that he wins like that, it feels cheap, it feels like a lump in his throat at 3am, it feels like hours spent in the stables, away - from her, from his children, from mirrors that show him a man lost, a man afraid.

He will run again. This time for president. He will win. He will win, because his father is a powerful man. He will win. He will still live in his shadow.

/

She confuses him. She is like no woman he has known before. She is confident the way he has only seen men be; she is brilliant and right and intelligent, but it's her confidence that astounds him, that spins him off his axis, or maybe towards it. She is his equal, and _she_ knows it. It's the confidence that attracts him. The lack of weakness.

It's the weakness that makes him fall in love. The way he can see her struggle to keep her eyes away, to keep her fingers from brushing against his flesh, to keep her thoughts clean and simple and aligned neatly around the campaign checklists. It's the battle inside of her, the one raging deep inside that makes him fall in love. It's her weakness that makes him fearless.

The firs time he kisses her, he doesn't feel warmth - he feels fire.

He understands what it means to come undone.

He understands what it means to find your other half.

He understands what it means to love. He knows now - it has nothing to do with loneliness and everything to do with feeling complete, sated.

/

_Mistress, _and his world crumbles. He hears his mother in her voice. He hates himself. And when he says it to her, years later, he hates _her_, for turning him into a man who despises her weakness. He loses himself in a single word. He finds himself at the bottom of a scotch bottle, over and over again. He drinks to lose himself again.

The word is like a noose - it tightens, it brings them together, until it finally kills them.

They tell him she's gone, flown off, on a plane a lot like the one he used to hold up with his small fingers, hidden under the table.

He knows now, he was wrong, _mistress_, isn't the opposite of love - it's the end of love. All love. He doesn't know, and maybe, he never will that the anger in his mother's voice, the venom, was fear - that the only person his father ever loved was another; and the anger, the edge in his father's tone was an attempt to hide his only weakness.

He is five. He doesn't understand nuance. He doesn't understand snippets. He doesn't understand that love isn't a straight line, like in the stories - life doesn't have neat endings.

In life, love changes, it evolves, it thickens or thins, it flourishes, or withers, but in life - love doesn't die. It doesn't just disappear. Especially not the kind of love that sets the soul alight.

* * *

Hope all the old folks are doing well, hi - to all the new ones. Sending you love! xx


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